When did you discover ERE?

[Chad]

In varying degrees I had already had many of the ERE ideas. My parents were frugal, so it wasn't a big stretch for me to become frugal. Though, I still needed to develop my knowledge concerning various aspects of personal finance and investing. To further this knowledge I was reading various blogs and stumbled onto ERE. I'm not 100% sure whenor how, but it has been quite a while. 2009? Could be earlier, but I don't really remember. I do know I was on here before the forums and thought the idea of creating them wasn't the greatest, so I didn't come into the forums until it had been up for a little while.

[Hankaroundtheworld]

I always hated debt (because of my parents history but also this bad feeling of dependency), and when I started to work abroad (meaning, no standard pension savings) 15 years ago, I had to learn how to save for a "pension", which I targeted at being 50. I was not really aware of ERE since 2 years, but unaware, I was already on track but not always in the best way.

By the way, back to ERE definition, it is not just a realization of how quick you can be FI (and then do what you like, even if it is work), but more like a life-philosophy, so basically start doing more yourself (by learning and trying out), re-use versus buy-new, realize that there is an optimal balance in everyone's life between "consumption" and "happiness" and that you can overshoot (when possessions become a burden, like a too big house, etc...). From that angle, this is a continuous learning process, you might "discover" ERE but it takes time to make it your own, like a normal life-attitude...

[TheWanderingScholar]

2009 December, IIRC.

I was a sophomore in high school and I was looking around personal finance blogs, looking for information for financing my college degree because I came from a family that made too much to be considered for financial aid yet too little to pay for college without going into debt. One of the blogs I was on, mentioned ERE and it started from there.

[northman]

22.01.10

Two days later, I had read all the blogs and sent Jacob an e-mail.

Quite the eye-opener.

[candide]

Reviving the thread, but changing the "when" to "how."

=====

I was on a summer break, and that allowed for the kind of healthy mild boredom that lets one re-examine life. I thought to myself "what are some free hobbies I could have?" I did a google search and I am pretty sure that the site that I was directed to was retireby40, but it doesn't look anything like it did when I made that search.

At the time, the post was noted as by far the most popular thing on the site, and another page gave credit to Early Retirement Extreme. . . None of this is easy to locate in its current glossy version. But still, it got me over to ERE.

Also, it was from ERE's blogroll that I was first exposed to the Archdruid Report (OH! Real time, I just realized I can use that to figure about when I made the search . . . It must have been somewhere around 2014-2015). I went pretty far down the collapse rabbit hole from there, but that a different story . . .

[AxelHeyst]

This thread caused me to look back in my receipts and figure out when I actually bought the book out of curiosity. November 2017, within days of deciding to break up with a woman I'd been dating for half a decade. I was in Greece at the time. Clearly I was doing euphoric 'wtf to do with my life now that I'm free' research. Huh.

At that time I speed read it, absorbed almost nothing. I hadn't read any of the blog; I probably found the book via algorithmic recommendation. I was busy finishing Serenity and getting on with my life, and thought I had everything figured out. I'd been on to MMM for years in a shallow way and figured by vanlifing I pretty much had a FIRE trajectory in the bag.

Flash forward to January 2020, I have a new gf and my NW is going back down again. I realize I gotta do something extreme if I ever want to be free. That triggers a memory, dimly, of having read the book and I dig it back out of my Kindle library and reread it in a night or two. It sticks this time. Been here ever since.

[Lemur]

Initially discovered MMM in 2012. 50% savings rate and I was still thinking "man 17 years is still too long..." It wasn't until years later where I read a blog post by MMM that said the "baton" was passed from Jacob at ERE. I was curious what ERE was. Rest is history I guess as I was hooked after reading the blog posts.

Since discovering ERE, I've become a much more avid reader (I didn't read at all before...) and my mind has been opened up to so many things. The ERE book was life changing / paradigm shifting for me and then at that moment I wondered what else I was missing out on. I heard the same message twice in a college course by a really great professor of mine that briefed us on meta-cognition (i.e. thinking about your thinking) and he emphasized the need to READ. I'm very lucky to hit both of these around the same time and make that connection.

I make it a point to do a rereading of the ERE book every year / two years or so as I gain new perspectives. I know I've grown because the ERE book was a tough read for me the first time but it is a much easier read now.

I've a lot of gratitude for discovering systems thinking, voluntary simplicity, and all the other fringe topics that fall here.

[Slevin]

Late 2014 I was within 6 months of finishing my BS in Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, had job set up making what I thought was infinite money (about 1/3rd of my current income) working on spacecraft software. Didn't know how personal finance worked. My father told me to save x% for retirement. I was confused about that number and wanted to know where it was derived from. I think this funneled me to the FIRE world, and then obviously biased baby physicist me decided the advice from the physicist in the space that was derived from first principles made absolutely the most sense. This matched up with my quick hatred of my new job of being micromanaged and working with people 20 years older than me that I couldn't relate to. So i built in an exit ASAP strat.

This all fell apart when a 6 year long relationship did, quit that job I hated (but thought the money was pretty good), and bummed around Europe for a bit (mid-late 2016? I think?). I promptly ignored FIRE for the next few years (though the principles were pretty inbuilt. Never spent much on rent, hobbies, etc other than for gear which pays itself off quickly), got really into mountaineering, then climbing, then trad climbing, then movement, then ended up back here in 2021 or so?

[daylen]

I discovered ERE around the time this thread was started (2015). At the time I was working on a math degree and exploring potential application topics like finance. The ERE book somehow came up in this research, and I was instantly hooked. I remember it being vastly more interesting than all the other finance books I was scouring at the time. Signed up for the forum soon after.

[bostonimproper]

I read Rich Dad Poor Dad when I was like 12, so that got me the passive inflows > outflows = you can retire mindset pretty early. I think I found the ERE blog sometime in college, circa 2011-ish? Whenever it was, it was pre-Jacob passing the FIRE baton to MMM, because I remember that recommendation then reading the MMM blog and not being as into it.

[Toska2]

ERE or ERE(tm)?

ERE - age 16. My grades were only good enough for a "half ride" and my parents weren't paying for college. In hindsight I should have become a millwright or linesman.

ERE(tm) 26ish. IWith a true carreer job, I had no peers with my savings rate so I sought some.

[sky]

I read a book called Voyaging Under Sail, by Annie Hill, and in that book there was an article by Weston Martyr: "The £200 Millionaire". http://www.bluemoment.com/200pm.html

That article made me decide to 1. live off of income and 2. live extremely frugally. At that time my goal was to buy a sailboat and have $100,000 in investments. That was probably in the early 1990's, although my goal was to live on a sailboat even as early as in my teens.

I credit Jacob with showing me the math relationship between reduced spending and a reduction in the number of months needed to RE: reducing one's expenses reduces the amount of investment needed to live off the income, while also increasing the amount one can save of one's income. EUREKA!

I lost my password to my first account on this board, I was here for some time before creating this username.

[jacob]

That article made me decide to 1. live off of income and 2. live extremely frugally. At that time my goal was to buy a sailboat and have $100,000 in investments. That was probably in the early 1990's, although my goal was to live on a sailboat even as early as in my teens.

To complete the circle, I came across your website some time between 2004 and 2006 reading your miniseries on how to retire early through frugality.

[Scott 2]

I first came across the anti-consumer ideas with Ad Buster's magazine, around 99. The Millionaire Next Door and Rich Dad Poor Dad not too long after. The frugal girl blog, maybe a few years later? I think she might have preceded Jacob.

After years of reading Ad Buster's at book stores, I eventually subscribed - but only once. I was too cheap! Amazing they are still around. I don't know if they originated buy nothing day, but they definitely popularized it.

I remember commenting on the ERE blog back when it was active, showing my wife the rake, MMM emerging on the scene, etc. So I must have been on here around 2008? In parallel, I was on early-retirement.org. I never leaned fully in to the 80% savings rate, more like 50%.

Around that same time, I read the entire tightwad gazette compilation, and explored my frugality. Made the price book, calculated meal costs down to the penny, etc. My wife still washes plastic bags. I discovered your money or your life then as well.

I specifically remember searching for and finding both sites at work, because I really did not want to be there. I told the owner at my next company about this crazy guy living in an RV with his PhD. I must have been more vocal about it than I intended, because when I retired, people remembered!

[mathiverse]

In 2015, I learned about FIRE on reddit and the discussions there led me to the ERE blog. I started reading the blog and I got the book from my uni library soon after that. I lurked on the forum for a long time until I finally got an account and started posting in 2019 after reading YMoYL and being disappointed in how much of my income I had spent since the start of my career.

[seanconn256]

For me happened quite quickly.

I started working in 2020, immediately had a "its going to be like this for 40 years?!?" freakout and decided to retire early no matter what. I did some armchair math and calculated I could retire at 40 with even a small savings rate. I wanted to see if I could go further.
I had heard of FIRE before, so I went to reddit.
Reddit has two main fire subreddits, leanFIRE and fatFIRE. I was already spending at leanfire levels (20-30k), and fatfire just seemed absurd to me, so I landed there. I quickly read every link I could find and found ERE in the reccomended books. I read the forum, bought the book, havent gone on the subreddit since.

[WFJ]

My first brush was reading Millionaire Next Door as I was in sales and it was easier to sell and manage ten millionaires my services than 1000 thousandaires. Successfully applied many of the concepts covered in the book to my own life and career. Also read Affluenza and I think Australian documentary around this time (below) which chronicles the absurdity of consumption in the Western World. Did not come across ERE until the book popped up on my Amazon suggestions in around 2016 after ordering books on systems engineering. By the time I actually read ERE or any FIRE gurus, and used FIRE techniques, was well under 4% SWR.

https://www.pbs.org/kcts/affluenza/home.html

[loutfard]

I heard about this early retirement extreme thing at least five or six years ago, but never thoroughly explored it. The reasons? The "early retirement extreme" title felt to me like there must be a US style sensationalist miracle solution under the superlative cover. Quod non. ERE is also often misrepresented in the FIRE world as overly focused on financial savings only. Ironic, because if anything, FIRE is often much more unidimensional than ERE in its focus on finances. In any case, those two factors instinctively put me off.

It took me a recent unexpected windfall of spare time to finally dig into ERE. I _think_ it started with a less negative description of ERE by a MMM forum user. Jacob, I remember looking at your wikipedia page and noticing you actually grew up in Denmark. That roped me in a bit further, because surely get rich quick US sensationalism is below a STEM PhD who grew up in Denmark, right? Prejudiced instinct on my side, but whatever, it helped me dig in.

The book is very useful, even if a bit hard to chew on at times. Jacob, your skills presenting the subject have grown a lot since publishing your book. I was quite impressed by the clarity of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPvftqB-WXk for example. Thank you for your efforts, Jacob!

I was similarly impressed by this forum and how it feels like an oasis of civility. Thank you for your efforts, forum members!

I was coasting through life roughly in the right direction. More focus than most, but blurry goals sometimes that were not always very well-aligned between them. ERE is like a consistent life framework tailor-made to me. It feels like pure bliss to me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!

[grundomatic]

Today a memory popped up in Google Photos. 8 years ago we were moving from our rental with a mountain view (they were right there) in a fancy neighborhood to the smallest place we could find that didn't feel like a roach motel. I had been reading the blog for some months before that, but to me that move marked the beginning of the real journey (actions taken).

[Seppia]

The book is very useful, even if a bit hard to chew on at times. Jacob, your skills presenting the subject have grown a lot since publishing your book.

It’s funny, I liked “more rough around the edges” jacob a lot.
The book and blog are in your face pure and “punk” in a way that is absolutely effing awesome

But then I am the kind of guy who likes Show No Mercy, Kill’em All and Iron Maiden better than South Of Heaven, Black Album and The Number Of the Beast.